Tag Archives: erotica

Book Review: Solstice Surrender, by Tracy Cooper-Posey

I picked up a copy of Solstice Surrender, by Tracy Cooper-Posey, way back in 2013 and it’s been chillin’ in my cloud ever since. This year, I thought the solstice might be holiday-like enough to be included in my holiday reading challenge.

For Special Investigations Agency Operatives Destiny Tremayne, Jenna MacDonald and Nur Aydan, Christmas isn’t all about celebrating.

Jenna MacDonald, cynic extraordinaire, flees to Banff, Canada, for the holiday season to lick her wounds in private after an assignment takes a tragic turn. But trouble manages to find her even in the heart of the Canadian Rockies. A mysterious stranger called Rhys Cellyn exerts a powerful influence over her mind and body, while Jenna struggles to stay afloat in the mythical world he plunges her into. Time is against her, for at the moment of the winter solstice she must make a fateful choice. I’m going to get housekeeping out of the way first. I read this as part of my Holiday Reading Challenge, thinking that being set during the solstice might give this a bit of a holiday theme. But it really doesn’t. The solstice is important to the plot, but not in any sort of holiday-related way, not even a solstice holiday. So, it’s kind of a failure in that regard.

Moving on to the review itself, I knew I was in trouble when I read the note in the introduction that mentioned that this book had originally been written as a novella for an Ellora’s Cave anthology. Ellora’s Cave had a pretty predictable story format—lots of sex, very little plot. Cooper-Posey said she’d expanded the novella into a short novel, but I didn’t expect the sex to plot ratio to change. I was right, it didn’t. And while there was a time I quite enjoyed such books (that’s how I knew what to expect from Ellora’s Cave), now is not the time. So, I spent a lot of this book skimming.

I will assert that this was better than most of what I read from Ellora’s Cave, but it wasn’t very good when judged on its own. The writing wasn’t the issue. Other than a disconcerting and anachronistic tendency to use “for” in sentences, the writing is actually fine. The editing had a few hiccups, but nothing egregious. It’s just that the plot is so very thin and there is so very very little character development, world-building, romantic build-up, etc that the story barely holds together. And then there is a ton of sex to further destabilize it all.

So, I’m just gonna have to go with “Meh” for this one.

Come backlater this afternoon. I’ll be reviewing Charley’s Christmas Wolf, by C.D. Gorri and tomorrow when I’ll be reviewing The Problem With Mistletoe, by Kyle Baxter and Fighting For Us, by Bella Emy. Yeah, I’ve had to star doubling up to fit them all in by Christmas.

Book Review – Eternal: Micah’s Mate, by Tianna Xander

You guys, I promised myself that this year I wouldn’t find myself in mid-December scrambling to find the last few books for my yearly Author Alphabet Challenge. I was gonna have read a book by an author for every letter of the alphabet early this year. And I was on target to do it too. I had read everything except X and maybe U by about August. But man that X-author just kept right out of reach and here it is December 16th and I’ve just now made a desperate grab for an X-authored book, just like every year. Thus I read Eternal: Micah’s Mate, by Tianna Xander. I’m happy to be able to say it completes my challenge, but disappointed that I let it get this far into the year again. Maybe next year will be the year I get it complete early.

It feels like the whole world is against her – but that doesn’t mean there’s no time for love.

I was sure I’d end up alone forever. But as soon as I bumped into six-foot-six of tall, dark, and handsome male vampire perfection, my plans were thrown on their head. Being wanted for murder sucks – but after meeting Micah, things suddenly don’t seem so bad after all…

Micah swore to protect my father’s interests… even if that means babysitting his sassy and snarky daughter. He knows I have an attitude – but he’s still drawn to me. And between his skills and my interdimensional magic, we might just be able to make it out of this in one piece…

This simply isn’t very good. The mechanical writing and editing seems fine, but the plotting and story are a mess. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this isn’t a story. It’s a series of random events connected only in that the main character is there for all of them. There is no story to become invested in because there is no story to follow. It’s just what random thing will happen next with no foreshadowing, buildup, or explanation before falling instantly into irrelevance. New characters are being introduced all the way until the end, which means the reader has no connection of care for them. Nothing has any emotional impact, because nothing is given any time to develop. There is very little world-building and a ton of inconsistencies even in what there is. Honestly, if I hadn’t needed an X-author for my yearly Author Alphabet Challenge I’d have DNFed this pretty early on.

Book Review: Unhinged, by Onley James

I picked up a copy of Unhinged, by Onley James, as an Amazon freebie.

Adam Mulvaney lives a double life. By day, he’s the spoiled youngest son of an eccentric billionaire. By night, he’s an unrepentant killer, one of seven psychopaths raised to right the wrongs of a justice system that keeps failing.

Noah Holt has spent years dreaming of vengeance for the death of his father, but when faced with his killer, he learns a daunting truth he can’t escape. His father was a monster.

Unable to ignore his own surfacing memories, Noah embarks on a quest to find the truth about his childhood with the help of an unlikely ally: the very person who murdered his father. Since their confrontation, Adam is obsessed with Noah, and he wants to help him uncover the answers he seeks, however dark they may be.

The two share a mutual attraction, but deep down, Noah knows Adam’s not like other boys. Adam can’t love. He wasn’t born that way. But he refuses to let Noah go, and Noah’s not sure he wants him to.

Can Adam prove to Noah that passion, power, and protection are just as good as love?

This book has any number of toxic and problematic elements. The way it talks about children who have been victims of traumatic events and develop socio- or psychopathy as broken and irredeemable is hugely problematic. The way it talks about those adults is equally problematic. The relationship between Adam and Noah is toxic and problematic. The circumvention of the legal system and the enactment of vigilante justice is problematic. The uncomfortable parallel of the evil pedophiles doing as they want despite the immorality and illegality of it and the (apparently) not evil psychopathic murders doing as they want despite the immorality and illegality of it is unavoidable and problematic.

There are more problematic aspects to this book than not, honestly. But it’s fictional and oftentimes the unspoken compact between the author and the reader to ensure the main characters remain safe (even as they struggle) and have a happy ending makes the book safe enough to allow the reader to say, “I acknowledge this would be reprehensible in real life, but in this fictional setting I’m going to set that fact aside and enjoy the fiction of it.”

That’s the intersection I stood at while reading Unhinged. It’s a crazy, fun read and I enjoyed a lot of it, with the exception of one big thing. Personally, I couldn’t abide the layering of Noah’s history of catastrophic child sexual abuse with his adult sex with Adam. They are separate events, true. But personally I just don’t want child rape in my sexy-time books, in general. I don’t like to associate those two things in my mind AT ALL.

Certainly it qualifies for everything I said in above paragraph. But I try to avoid rape in the books I read for entertainment, even a history of it. I absolutely don’t want to read about a kid getting raped (or an adult remembering being raped as a child) and then turn the page and immediately feel the flutter of sexual excitement from the subsequent sex scene. I want those two things MILES apart. I do not want them associated in ANY WAY.

That’s a personal hard limit for me and Unhinged all but smashes them together. Noah uses sex to help deal with his emerging memories of abuse, so the reveal and discussion of the abuse was almost always immediately followed by a sex scene. Which means the reader is still remembering the child abuse while feeling the titillation of the sex scene. No thank you from me on that front.

But unless every book in the series follows the same plot-line then I can say that I liked the rest of the book enough to continue the series. I liked Adam’s ‘I just can’t human well’ crazy possessiveness. I liked Noah’s acceptance of it. I liked the brothers snark. The sex was sexy. There was a large aspect of this plot I disliked having to engage with. But I liked the overarching series-level story and look forward to getting to know the other 6 brothers.

Other Reviews:

Review: Unhinged (Necessary Evils #1) by Onley James

https://neverhollowed.com/2021/10/22/review-unhinged-by-onley-james/